Lightroom Public Beta 3 Available

I just downloaded Adobe Lightroom Public Beta 3 and have been playing with some of its new features. This is a substantial upgrade from Beta 2, including a new module: Web.

That's where I started experimenting. The Web templates are quite attractive. You have 3 presets -- HTML gallery, Exif metadata, and Flash gallery. You have two options for exporting: Save to your hard drive or upload to your web server. You can enter your FTP settings directly in Lightroom saving you a couple steps.

The code Lightroom generates is XHTML compliant and looks fairly clean. It uses CSS and JavaScript to perform much of its appearance and navigation magic. I really liked how my generated site performed in both Safari and Firefox.

The Develop module also received some attention. You now have a set of tools above the filmstrip for Loupe View, Before View, Before/After, Crop Overlay, Hand Tool, and White Balance selector. In Beta 2, we just had the last three of those tools down there. You now get RGB value readouts too.

Overall, there are many UI refinements, and the performance was smooth... for the most part. I did crash the application once while working in the Web module. I'll continue to explore Beta 3 in future posts. For now, I recommend you download it and give this latest version of Lightroom a spin.

Oh, and still no word on the Windows version yet. For now, the beta is only Mac.